A good old English gardener once said, "You can't grow things well
without plenty of manure," and this the Egyptians found out years ago.
They have the great advantage of the fertile mud deposited by the river,
but to bring it to its highest state of production land seems to ask for
the crude form of animal plant food as well as the vegetable and
mineral.
It is to be presumed that there must be a great deal of vegetable
fertilisation swept down by the Nile in a decayed state from the forests
and swamps of Central Africa, but Egypt itself is no land of forests and
that wondrous help to vegetation, leaf mould, may be said to be entirely
absent, while the ordinary animal excreta so carefully collected in most
civilised countries for application to the land is sadly wanted and
neglected here for farm and garden purposes. It is carefully collected,
it is true, and dried; but here, in a country where wood is exceedingly
scarce, it is used for fuel.
As a rule, the resulting ashes are regarded as of little worth, whereas
they contain, in a mineral form, so many of the constituents of
vegetable life that, if preserved, they would be most valuable. In
fact, the fellaheen look upon the ashes in the same light as they are
regarded here in England, if they are thought of at all, as a coarse
ingredient to mix with a clayey soil to lighten it in the place of sand.
But in these islands there is the excuse that for the most part they
are coal ashes and wanting in fertilising powers. Where they are wood
or vegetable ashes the English cultivator has long known their value
from the extent to which they are impregnated with potash. Still, there
can be no doubt that the ash of the Egyptian fuel, though not returned
to the earth in a well-thought-out and business-like way, does play its
part to some extent in restoring exhausted soil.
The term "farmyard manure" is common of application, but an English
farmer would look at it in amazement and not know his good old friend
again, for the Egyptian farmyard manure seems to have been invented by
the sanitarians of our dry earth system, being composed of desiccated
Nile mud which has been carefully spread over the floors of the
cattle-sheds as litter wherever bullocks, cows, horses, sheep, etc., are
kept.
In this fine, dry state, the once mud, now earth, is remarkably
absorbent and sweetening; most healthy, too, for the animals, who are
not seen here trampling nearly knee deep in the soon-made foetid swamp
of a country crew-yard. Moreover the earth is frequently removed--to be
kept lying in the manure heap for about a year to mature, when it is
considered ready for use, and the cattle enclosures and sheds of a farm
are remarkably wholesome and clean.
This dry mud is one great source of plant food for the farm, but it is
largely supplemented by what the Egyptians term _coufri_, or _sabbakh_.
This is not always available, and depends upon the position of the farm;
but there are parts of the Delta where, to all appearance, the tract
being reclaimed or taken up for bringing into cultivation is so much
level, or nearly level, land, with a mound or slight elevation here and
there where the winds have drifted the sand apparently to a considerable
depth. Except to the eye of the experienced there is nothing to show
that flourishing cities and villages have existed there in the past; but
many of these slight elevations are the sites where teeming populations
once existed, and all has gone back, with some few exceptions--dust to
dust. The exceptions are where the spade of the fellah comes upon the
remains of a tomb or priestly edifice, these, as is well-known, being
the lasting part of man's work, which are being discovered constantly
even now, with their builders', sculptors', and painters' handiwork
looking, when the sand has been removed, almost as fresh and uninjured
as if they were the traces of two or three generations back instead of
having been buried many centuries ago.
These solid remains, or ruins, may be comparatively few; but in all
probability have been surrounded by an enormous population, whose
houses, originally built of the sun-dried Egyptian brick, have in the
course of time gone back, like everything animal that surrounded them,
to a rough earth ready for the worker's spade, which digs up from an
almost inexhaustible mine--with nothing to tell of the past but a few
broken shards--a splendid fertiliser for the farm.
But this _coufri_ manure requires discrimination in its use, too strong
an application being likely to prove hurtful to a crop, seeing that
analysis shows that its plant-feeding qualities are due to the salts it
contains--sometimes as much as 12 per cent, of salt, soda, ammonia,
saltpetre, phosphates, and the like.
The value to an English farmer of such a mine of artificial chemical
manure as this may be conceived, and it would make the eyes brighten of
one here who strengthens his land by applications of marl, or else has
to content himself with a top dressing of chalk from some pit sunk in a
corner of his holding.
Fairly plentiful still in Egypt, there must, of course, be a limit to
this supply. The taking up of land is going steadily on, and
consequently the remains of city after city have been and are being
rapidly used up, thus necessitating the establishment of plans upon a
practical basis for the restoration of land which should not be
exhausted by heavy crops without the cultivator making a proper return.
One of our students of agriculture, in a public address, deals largely
with the necessity for the dissemination of a practical knowledge of the
needs of the land. He speaks of the great waste of fertilising matter
in the way in which the refuse stalks of two of the greatest crops of
the Delta--cotton and sugar-cane--are burned in the furnaces of engines,
for which purpose they are most valuable when it is taken into
consideration that fuel wood is a rarity and coal a luxury of exorbitant
price.
But after burning, so ignorant have the people been, that the tons upon
tons in the aggregate of this rich ash from the engine fires which
consume the refuse of the enormous crops of sugar-cane annually grown,
have been looked upon as comparatively valueless, in spite of the fact
that the ash contains almost all that is required for the growth of so
exhaustive a crop, and it has been either cast away or sold for a
trifle, to be used up in the manufacture of bricks. He adds, in words
full of pregnant meaning, that even the fertile alluvium of the Nile
Valley cannot long sustain this treatment without exhaustion, in spite
of the much that is done by the feeding off and ploughing in of the
leguminous crops, which play a great part in giving back what has been
taken away.
Farms here, too, are often found with a large dovecote, as alluded to in
the description of the Khedive's estates; for the Egyptian cultivator
has a fine substitute for the guano of the Peruvian Chincha Islands in
that of the pigeons which are kept in flocks for the sake of this strong
fertiliser. Undoubtedly they must take severe toll from the crops,
whether green or fit for harvesting, though perhaps this is
counterbalanced by the fact that the birds must gain a good subsistence
upon the grain that would be wasted or go back to the soil, so much
being shed at ingathering time in consequence of the heat.
This carefully-saved fertiliser is used by the Egyptian for applying to
vegetables and such productions as water melons and other plants of the
gourd family, which depend much for their size on stimulation.
The application of special commercial manures to Egyptian crops may be
said to be still in the experimental stage. On the richest and most
fertile soils they are not required, but on the poorer soils their
effect is very apparent. For the cotton crop, superphosphate and
nitrate of soda, in the proportion of 3 to 4 hundredweights
superphosphate to 1.25 hundredweight nitrate of soda, mixed and applied
to an acre, give a profitable return in an increased yield of cotton.
Other manures, such as potash, have been tried, but did not prove
satisfactory. Sulphate of ammonia and nitrate of soda give good results
on poor land if applied to the wheat crop. As not more than half enough
farmyard manure can be produced on large estates for fertilising the
various crops, attention will be turned to chemicals should they prove
to be profitable after exhaustive experiments.